Book picks similar to
Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits by James D. Zirin
nonfiction
non-fiction
politics
trump
The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty-Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton
Michael D'Antonio - 2020
The worst took the form of sexism and misogyny, much of it barely disguised.A pioneer for women, Clinton was burdened in ways no man ever was. Defined by a right-wing conspiracy, she couldn't declare what was happening lest she be cast as weak and whiny. Nevertheless, she persisted and wouldn't let them define her. As The Hunting of Hillary makes clear, her achievements have been all the more remarkable for the unique opposition she encountered. The 2016 presidential election can only be understood in the context of the primal and primitive response of those who just couldn't imagine that a woman might lead.For those who seek to understand the experience of the most accomplished woman in American politics, The Hunting of Hillary offers insight. For those who recognized what happened to her, it offers affirmation. And for those who hope to carry Clinton's work into the future, it offers inspiration and instruction.
Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs—A True Story of Ambition, Wealth, Betrayal, and Murder
Ben Mezrich - 2015
Locked in a complex, uniquely Russian partnership, Berezovsky and Abramovich battled their way through the “Wild East” of Russia with Berezovsky acting as the younger man’s krysha — literally, his roof, his protector.Written with the heart-stopping pacing of a thriller—but even more compelling because it is true—this story of amassing obscene wealth and power depicts a rarefied world seldom seen up close. Under Berezovsky’s krysha, Abramovich built one of Russia’s largest oil companies from the ground up and in exchange made cash deliveries—including 491 million dollars in just one year. But their relationship frayed when Berezovsky attacked President Vladimir Putin in the media—and had to flee to the UK. Abramovich continued to prosper. Dead bodies trailed Berezovsky’s footsteps, and threats followed him to London, where an associate of his died painfully and famously of Polonium poisoning. Then Berezovsky himself was later found dead, declared a suicide.Exclusively sourced, capturing a momentous period in recent world history, Once Upon a Time in Russia is at once personal and political, offering an unprecedented look into the wealth, corruption, and power behind what Graydon Carter called “the story of our age.”
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
Bill BrowderBill Browder - 2014
It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia. In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder's offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund's companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder's attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear. Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei's name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.
The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency
Chris Whipple - 2017
The chiefs of staff, often referred to as "the gatekeepers," wield tremendous power in Washington and beyond; they decide who is allowed to see the president, negotiate with Congress to push POTUS's agenda, and--most crucially--enjoy unparalleled access to the leader of the free world. Each chief can make or break an administration, and each president reveals himself by the chief he picks.Through extensive, intimate interviews with all seventeen living chiefs and two former presidents, award-winning journalist and producer Chris Whipple pulls back the curtain on this unique fraternity. In doing so, he revises our understanding of presidential history, showing us how James Baker's expert managing of the White House, the press, and Capitol Hill paved the way for the Reagan Revolution--and, conversely, how Watergate, the Iraq War, and even the bungled Obamacare rollout might have been prevented by a more effective chief.Filled with shrewd analysis and never-before-reported details, The Gatekeepers offers an essential portrait of the toughest job in Washington.
Settle for More
Megyn Kelly - 2016
She goes behind-the-scenes of her career, sharing the stories and struggles that landed her in the anchor chair and taught her to ask the tough questions. Speaking candidly about her decision to "settle for more"—a motto she credits as having dramatically transformed her life at home and at work—Megyn discusses how she abandoned a thriving legal career to follow her journalism dreams.Admired for her hard work, humor, and authenticity, Megyn sheds light on the news business, her time at Fox News, the challenges of being a professional woman and working mother, and her most talked about television moments. She also speaks openly about Donald Trump’s feud with her, revealing never-before-heard details about the first Republican debate, its difficult aftermath, and how she persevered through it all.Deeply personal and surprising, Settle for More offers unparalleled insight into this charismatic and intriguing journalist, and inspires us all to embrace the principles—determination, honesty, and fortitude in the face of fear—that have won her fans across the political divide.
Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
David Enrich - 2020
Bill Broeksmit had helped build the 150-year-old financial institution into a global colossus, and his sudden death was a mystery, made more so by the bank’s efforts to deter investigation. Broeksmit, it turned out, was a man who knew too much.In Dark Towers, award-winning journalist David Enrich reveals the truth about Deutsche Bank and its epic path of devastation. Tracing the bank’s history back to its propping up of a default-prone American developer in the 1880s, helping the Nazis build Auschwitz, and wooing Eastern Bloc authoritarians, he shows how in the 1990s, via a succession of hard-charging executives, Deutsche made a fateful decision to pursue Wall Street riches, often at the expense of ethics and the law.Soon, the bank was manipulating markets, violating international sanctions to aid terrorist regimes, scamming investors, defrauding regulators, and laundering money for Russian oligarchs. Ever desperate for an American foothold, Deutsche also started doing business with a self-promoting real estate magnate nearly every other bank in the world deemed too dangerous to touch: Donald Trump. Over the next twenty years, Deutsche executives loaned billions to Trump, the Kushner family, and an array of scandal-tarred clients, including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Dark Towers is the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality—the corporate equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. It is also the story of a man who was consumed by fear of what he’d seen at the bank—and his son’s obsessive search for the secrets he kept.
Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants
H.W. Brands - 2018
W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracyIn the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery. Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery. They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart. Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.
Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: The Dirty Dealers and Defenders of the Indefensible Who Are "Making America Great Again"
John Nichols - 2017
Showing no inclination toward moderation, tolerance or genuine bipartisanship, he has assembled a team that is backed with billionaires, CEOs, rigid ideologues and a rogue's gallery of white nationalists, alt-right hatemongers, voter-suppression schemers, immigrant bashers and climate-change deniers. The people Trump is bringing into his inner circle and handing positions of immense authority make no secret of their determination to impose an uncompromising and ultimately unworkable conservative agenda on a country where most Americans did not vote for Donald Trump or the Congress that will advance his policies. The Trump team, consisting of famously controversial figures and little-known but potentially even more dangerous mandarins, may not have mandate. But it will have the power to remake American foreign policy, redistribute wealth upward and suppress wages, destroy unions, dismantle Medicare and Medicaid, undermine abortion rights and affirmative action, privatize and voucherize education, make health care a privilege rather than a right and create a climate of fear and intimidation for immigrants, refugees, religious and racial minorities and Americans who dare to dissent. This is about much more than one man; this is about a wrecking crew with the power to transform everything we know about America and to make our country and our world a more dangerous place. If we are going to navigate the next four years and have the tools to fight back, we need to know who will be handling the levers of power. And we need to know how to challenge their excesses.Enter John Nichols, veteran political correspondent at The Nation, who has been covering many of these deplorables for decades. Sticking to the hard facts and unafraid to dig deep into histories and the ideologies of the people who make up Trump's inner circle, Nichols will deliver a clear-eyed and complete guide to who these people really are. This is not a laundry list of the high-profile politicians we are already familiar with -- in these pages Nichols will examine and expose all the new power players, including those who operate below the headlines but that can still cause immeasurable damage.
Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President
Justin A. Frank - 2018
Lee, M.D., M.Div., Yale psychiatrist, expert on violence, and editor of
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
The
New York Times
-bestselling author of
Bush on the Couch
shows that Donald Trump is mentally and emotionally unfit to execute the duties of President.
No president in the history of the United States has inspired more alarm and confusion than Donald Trump. As questions and concerns about his decisions, behavior, and qualifications for office have multiplied, they point to one primary question: Does he pose a genuine threat to our country? The American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule constrains psychiatrists from offering diagnoses on public figures who are not patients and who have not endorsed such statements. But in Trump on the Couch Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Justin A Frank invokes the moral responsibility that compels him to speak out and present a full portrait of a man who presents us with a clear and present danger.Using observations gained from a close study of Trump's patterns of thought, action, and communication, Dr. Frank uncovers a personality riddled with mental health issues. His analysis is filled with important revelations about our nation's leader, including disturbing insights into his childhood, his family, his business dealings, and his unusual relationship with alternative facts, including how * The absence of a strong maternal force during childhood has led to Trump's remarkable lack of empathy and disregard for women's boundaries; * His compulsion to polarize America has grown out of the way he perceives the world as full of deceitful and destructive persecutors; * His inability to tolerate the pain of frustration has triggered his belief that omnipotence will finally remove it; * His idiosyncratic use of language points to larger issues than even his tweets might suggest.With our country itself at stake, Dr. Frank calls attention to the underlying narcissism, misogyny, deception, and racism that drive the President who endangers it. A penetrating examination of how we as a nation got here and, more important, where we are going, Trump on the Couch sounds a call to action that we cannot ignore.
If Only They Didn't Speak English: Notes From Trump's America
Jon Sopel - 2017
In the time it’s taken for a reality star to go from laughing stock to leader of the free world, Jon has travelled the length and breadth of the United States, experiencing it from a perspective that most of us could only dream of: he has flown aboard Air Force One, interviewed President Obama and has even been described as ‘a beauty’ by none other than Donald Trump.Through music, film, literature, TV and even through the food we eat and the clothes that we wear we all have a highly developed sense of what America is and through our shared, tangled history we claim a special relationship. But America today feels about as alien a country as you could imagine. It is fearful, angry and impatient for change.In this fascinating, insightful portrait of American life and politics, Jon Sopel sets out to answer our questions about a country that once stood for the grandest of dreams, but which is now mired in a storm of political extremism, racial division and increasingly perverse beliefs.
Putin's People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West
Catherine Belton - 2020
The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it?In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche―a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad.Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach―and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match―Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.
Two Paths: America Divided or United
John Kasich - 2017
In Two Paths: America Divided or United, he carries that message forward by reflecting on the tumultuous 2016 campaign, sharing his concerns for America and his hopes for our future, and sounding a clarion call to reason and purpose, humility and dignity, righteousness and calm.“The country never looked so grand and magnificent as it did from ten thousand feet,” he writes of his time on the campaign trail, “and it was always a thrilling, faith-affirming thing to look out our window and see the sun splashing across Bryce Canyon in Utah, or the lights of the New York skyline at night as we flew past the Statue of Liberty, or an open field in the heartland that ran as far as our eyes could see.... I’d look out and think what an honor it would be to lead this great nation, what a blessing.”To be sure, the full story of the 2016 Presidential race will be written over time, but to understand what it was to be on the front lines of one of the most divisive and corrosive campaign battlegrounds in history, readers won’t find a richer, more thoughtful firsthand account than this one—a frank, refreshing assessment of the American dynamic and a clear path we might follow toward a more promising tomorrow.As Governor Kasich reminds us in these pages, America is great because America is good—and because Americans have stayed true to who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible.
Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue
Ryan Holiday - 2018
Thiel's sexuality had been known to close friends and family, but he didn't consider himself a public figure, and believed the information was private. This post would be the casus belli for a meticulously plotted conspiracy that would end nearly a decade later with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker, its bankruptcy and with Nick Denton, Gawker's CEO and founder, out of a job. Only later would the world learn that Gawker's demise was not incidental--it had been masterminded by Thiel.For years, Thiel had searched endlessly for a solution to what he'd come to call the "Gawker Problem." When an unmarked envelope delivered an illegally recorded sex tape of Hogan with his best friend's wife, Gawker had seen the chance for millions of pageviews and to say the things that others were afraid to say. Thiel saw their publication of the tape as the opportunity he was looking for. He would come to pit Hogan against Gawker in a multi-year proxy war through the Florida legal system, while Gawker remained confidently convinced they would prevail as they had over so many other lawsuit--until it was too late. The verdict would stun the world and so would Peter's ultimate unmasking as the man who had set it all in motion. Why had he done this? How had no one discovered it? What would this mean--for the First Amendment? For privacy? For culture?In Holiday's masterful telling of this nearly unbelievable conspiracy, informed by interviews with all the key players, this case transcends the narrative of how one billionaire took down a media empire or the current state of the free press. It's a study in power, strategy, and one of the most wildly ambitious--and successful--secret plots in recent memory.Some will cheer Gawker's destruction and others will lament it, but after reading these pages--and seeing the access the author was given--no one will deny that there is something ruthless and brilliant about Peter Thiel's shocking attempt to shake up the world.
Freedom's Detective: The Secret Service, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Man Who Masterminded America's First War on Terror
Charles Lane - 2019
WhitleIn the years following the Civil War, a new battle began. Newly freed African American men had gained their voting rights and would soon have a chance to transform Southern politics. Former Confederates and other white supremacists mobilized to stop them. Thus, the KKK was born.After the first political assassination carried out by the Klan, Washington power brokers looked for help in breaking the growing movement. They found it in Hiram C. Whitley. He became head of the Secret Service, which had previously focused on catching counterfeiters and was at the time the government’s only intelligence organization. Whitley and his agents led the covert war against the nascent KKK and were the first to use undercover work in mass crime—what we now call terrorism—investigations.Like many spymasters before and since, Whitley also had a dark side. His penchant for skulduggery and dirty tricks ultimately led to his involvement in a conspiracy that would bring an end to his career and transform the Secret Service.Populated by intriguing historical characters—from President Grant to brave Southerners, both black and white, who stood up to the Klan—and told in a brisk narrative style, Freedom’s Detective reveals the story of this complex hero and his central role in a long-lost chapter of American history.
Trump's America: The Truth about Our Nation's Great Comeback
Newt Gingrich - 2018
From his enthusiastic support of the Reagan administration to the 1994 Republican Revolution, he has spearheaded many successful initiatives to fight the Washington swamp, challenge the establishment, and restore conservative influence for his entire career. With his political expertise, Gingrich -- who has been called the President's chief explainer -- presents a clear picture of this historic presidency and its tremendous positive impact on our nation and the world. From the fight over the Southern Border Wall to the unending efforts to undermine and oppose the President, he unmasks all branches of the anti-Trump coalition, reveals the flaws in their ideological assaults, and offers a battle plan for those in Trump's America to help the President defeat these attacks.Throughout Trump's America, Gingrich distills decades of experience fighting Washington elites with a lifetime of studying history to help us understand how we can all keep working to make America great.